Academy and Armada Tweaking.

Just a few years ago i had a friend who opted for a tape drive over a zip drive. Dont ask me why, i dont know.
 
tape is still great for mass backups. I think it's much better than zip disks for backup purposes.

TC
 
You misunderstand - I know tape drives are used for backups, but the tape drive I was referring to uses the same size tapes as audio cassettes.
 
Erm, I thought the sort of tape drives used for backups were much larger and faster, and encased in shock protection or somesuch.
 
I had a tape drive on my old C64... God it ran SO SLOW!!! 20-30 minutes to load up PIRATES!

Someone help me with WC3! Look to tech support! :D
 
Hey, cool, someone mentioned Pirates! :) As I recall, that was the first time I was totally addicted to a game... still am, actually. I don't like Pirates! Gold, though...

Anyway, you're definitely not talking about the same thing... Wedge's drive used normal cassette tapes, which were slow (probably didn't have much space either, though I don't really know) and basically their only advantage was the low low price. On the other hand, the tapes that are used these days for backup are totally different - they have much more space, they're much costlier, and won't fit in your old cassette player :). They're still fairly slow (like the old tapes, you have to read... sequentially, I think the term is... if you want something from the end of the tape, you gotta go through the whole thing), but of course that's why they're only used for backup purposes.
 
Hehe, casette tapes. Actually, I think they might have had more space than the disks of their era -- I remember a friend of mine with a casette drive and a tape with a bunch of stupid little games on it.

Richard Garriott's first game, Akalabeth, was released on casette...
 
Yeah, but I think the disks in that era had 160 KB of space (and were even bigger than those 5.25 disks) :).
 
Eh eh... I also had a tape drive. I loved the funny noise it made when the CPU was reading it, it was so... "futuristic"... :)

I think each of those babies could hold up to 60-80 Megs of space... :cool:
A kind of "first version" of CD-ROMs (concerning large removable storing devices)...
 
Originally posted by Quarto
Hey, cool, someone mentioned Pirates! :) As I recall, that was the first time I was totally addicted to a game... still am, actually. I don't like Pirates! Gold, though...

Hey hey hey! Is this the same Pirates game where you can amass an armada, conquer the Spanish Main, take over other ships by dueling their captains and retire to become a governor? Incidentally I believe my copy was on 5.25 disks.
 
CDs aren't exactly incredibly convienant storage devices...it takes a good while to write to the thing...

FTPing your stuff, now that's convienance. How were the tape drives for accessability, though?

[Edited by Nep Parth on 07-03-2001 at 22:20]
 
Pirates was also the first game I was addicted to! Started playing in 1987 on the c64. A few years back I bought the PC version, then I bought Pirates Gold! (another 'PG' title :D)

Only thing with the c64 version it didn't have the ability to show your rank in the end (ie, becoming a Governor, etc)
 
The C64 version had one very neat feature in it, though - scrolling. In the PC version (and, for that matter, in the very sucky Pirates! Gold version), you had to sail to the edge of the screen, and then it would go on to the next. Nonetheless, it's the 16-colour PC version, not the C64 or the absolutely amazing Amiga version, that I was addicted to.
 
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